Rant

a car coming in the opposite direction, it crossed the centerline without slowing down a hair, and slammed into the man’s car.
    Shot Dunyun ( Party Crasher): The way Rant told me the story, Simms wakes up in a hospital bed, asking, “How long have I been here?” And the nurse tells him, “Four days…”
    Echo Lawrence ( Party Crasher): At the hospital, this young guy asked, “What happened to my car?”
    And the doctors said, “What car?” The police found him unconscious in the street. He was bruised, with a broken collarbone and breastbone.
    The guy asked, “Where’s my clothes?”
    And the doctors said, “What clothes?” The police had found him naked.
    Chester Casey: Everybody knows this is crazy talk, but Buster didn’t know that. Buddy must’ve believed the old man.
    Echo Lawrence: All those years ago, the police asked the guy his name and how to contact his family, and this guy told them. The next day, they came back to his hospital bed and told the guy that those people, his family, they didn’t exist.
    Shot Dunyun: The cops asked for his name and Citizen ID and Social Security numbers. And a day later, they told the man that he didn’t exist.
    Echo Lawrence: In the hospital, the doctors took one look at the scars on the guy’s arms, the punctures and puckers in his skin, and they asked, “What drugs were you doing?”
    They asked, “Were you aware that you’re infected with rabies?”
    Jarrell Moore ( Private Investigator): The injuries that Simms described to Rant Casey—the bruises across the iliac crest of the man’s hips, the cracked sternum, and the broken clavicle—these are all consistent with injuries inflicted by lap and shoulder belts during a high-speed head-on collision.
    Shot Dunyun: So, when Green Taylor Simms was twenty-three years old, he sneaks out of that hospital. As soon as they mention a move to the psych ward, he bails before they can put him behind a locked door. Simms steals some clothes and shoes, and bails. And outside, in just the four days he’s lost, the city isn’t divided into day and night. Not anymore. Nobody is ported on the back of their neck. People are reading: Books. Magazines. Newspapers. Through windows, he can see people watching television. From radios and stereos—music.
    Simms hitches a ride to the only place that seems safe. He goes back home to his family’s house, in Middleton. Yeah, the same hometown as Rant.
    Chester Casey: Breaks your heart, the load of loony insane lunacy that old Simms coot unloaded on my boy.
    Shot Dunyun: In the few years since Simms had moved to the city, somebody had cut down the four locust trees that each stood at a corner of his family’s yard. Planted there were four spindly locust saplings, not hand-high. On the house, Simms told Rant, somebody had replaced the buckled, blistered siding with straight new boards painted so clean white they looked blue. The paint, so fresh you could still smell it. His key didn’t work in the lock, and when he knocked, a girl answered the door.
    Chester Casey: Her name was Hattie, and she was pretty the way folks you love are pretty in old snapshots. When they’re still young and excited about life. Before time and work and you have destroyed their youth. Seventy years back, Hattie was thirteen years old and just home from school in that empty house, waiting for her folks to come back from work in a few hours.
    She must’ve seen something pretty in this Simms, because she took him inside and almost straight to bed. Straight enough.
    Echo Lawrence: Of course, this is the man’s version. He didn’t rape anybody. He didn’t guess who she really was until, laying there, waiting for dusk and her folks, Hattie said, “The only way they’ll let you stay is if I get knocked up…” And they had sex again. Midway through that second time, Hattie said she hoped it would be a girl baby. So she could call it Esther. And this strange young man came to orgasm, seeing the clock and calendar on her dresser. He asked her, “Is that thing right?”
    Hattie rolled her head on the pillow, looking over, and said, “Give or take a minute.” And he said, “No.” He said, “I mean the calendar…”
    Chester Casey: This old man talking nonsense to my boy, he said he knowed the moment that baby was conceived—felt a surge of energy, smarts, balls, and craziness break over him. Sure as rain or sunshine. “Better,” he said, “than any critter bite, poison, or justplain teeth